Ben Finney wrote: ... > The best advice I've seen when people ask "How do I validate whether > an email address is valid?" was "Try sending mail to it".
There are advantages to the regex method. It is faster than sending an email and getting a positive or negative return code. The delay may not be acceptable in many applications. Secondly, the false negatives found by a reasonable regex will be few compared to the number you'd get if the smtp server went down, or a remote relay was having problems delivering the message etc etc. >From a business point of view, it is probably more important to reduce the number of false negatives than to reduce the number of false positives - every false negative is a potential loss of a customer. False positives? Who cares really as long as they are paying ;-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
